Sous Vide |

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Advertisement

Supported by

Sous Vide

News about Sous Vide, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Updated: March 17, 2010

Once you sous vide, you never go back.

That, at least, is the chant of a global pantheon of chefs — like Heston Blumenthal, Joël Robuchon, Ferran Adrià, and Tetsuya Wakuda — who have made this low, slow cooking method the standard in the last decade.

Sous vide combines the gentle, steady heat of poaching and an airtight seal, as in traditional methods of cooking in clay. “The food literally stews in its own juices: no air, no water, no evaporation,” said Wesley Genovart, the chef at Degustation, a restaurant in the East Village, who has experimented with sous-viding everything from carrots to crème brûlée.

Modern sous-vide cooking originated in Switzerland in the 1960s as a way to preserve and sterilize food in hospital kitchens. Many restaurants now use the technique as a combination of cooking method and storage shortcut, because the food, once safely cooked under seal, can be quick-chilled and refrigerated for days.

Although the phrase “sous vide” translates to “in a vacuum,” the selling point of the cooking method is the steady, low temperature, not the airless environment.

In sous vide, the cooking temperature is around the same as the serving temperature. For example, medium-rare steak is about 135 degrees in the center. In sous-vide cooking, the entire piece of meat is cooked at 135 degrees, for as long as it takes for the heat to slowly penetrate to the center. The whole steak, edge to edge to edge, reaches 135 degrees and cannot overcook, because the water temperature never goes any higher.

By traditional methods, the steak has to be blasted with heat from the outside, anywhere from 350 degrees (normal oven temperature) to 800 degrees (the grill at Peter Luger’s). As the heat transfer takes place, the meat changes: proteins coagulate, fibers contract, collagens loosen, liquid evaporates. By the time the center is a rosy 135 degrees, the surrounding flesh is dried out.

This is not a problem that most home cooks are wringing their hands over. The public-relations challenge for sous vide is that it solves a problem so embedded in cooking that we don’t even notice it. Managing heat transfer — cutting into a steak, timing eggs, inspecting the juices of a roast chicken — is simply what cooks do, working by smell, sound, taste and touch, all of which are reduced or eliminated in sous vide.

At serving time, most professional chefs finish their dishes with a blast of heat on a grill or in an oven, to crisp the skin or add a crust. Although amazing flavor infusion can take place inside the bag, the food emerges unnervingly pale and soft.

Until now, home cooks wanting to try the method have had to improvise, with solutions from low-tech (a stockpot and a handful of ice cubes) to high (a chamber sealer and an immersion circulator, generating about $1,500 in start-up costs). But there seems to be an audience, however small, for an easier way.

Sous vide cooking is not cheap, and the system may not be perfect for home cooks, but the possibilities are fascinating. The appeal of consistently perfect soft-boiled eggs, poached salmon that requires no attention, and juicy filet-tender flank steak is undeniable.